Sunday, December 13, 2015

Donald Trump rises to new high in Wall St. Journal NBC News national poll, Dec. 6-9, 2015. Two polls were combined. Extra questions were added 'following Trump's proposal' on Dec. 8-9 to 495 respondents. That sample has 4.4 error margin. Separately, 'additional interviews on some questions were conducted on an additional sample of past GOP primary voters in order to increase to 400' the GOP survey total 12/6-9. That sample has 4.9% error margin-WSJ

"Donald Trump has risen to a new high and Ben Carson’s
support has plummeted among Republican primary voters after a
tumultuous month of international and domestic terrorism, a new Wall
Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.

Mr. Carson, the retired neurosurgeon, dropped to fourth place, with 11% support, down from 29% in late October. As terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif.,
heightened attention to national security in the past month, Mr. Carson
has stumbled on foreign policy questions, and critics have raised
doubts about his mastery of international affairs....Mr. Trump’s 27% support was
his highest showing in Journal/NBC News polling this year and compares
to 23% support in the prior survey, in late October. The results
continue to defy the expectations of many political analysts and Trump
rivals that the celebrity businessman’s candidacy would fade, or at
least hit a ceiling, when its novelty wore off.

The poll suggests
a new dynamic has arisen in the race, with Mr. Cruz becoming a
formidable force. His spike in support-to 22% of GOP primary voters, up
from 10% in late October-catapulted him to the poll’s No. 2 spot for the
first time since the 2016 campaign began.

Mr. Cruz has been assiduously courting evangelical voters
who had also been drawn to Mr. Carson, and the poll suggests his
efforts are reaping benefits. Support for Mr. Cruz among “values
voters”-those who most strongly support traditional marriage and oppose
abortion rights-increased to 27%, from 14% in October. Meanwhile for Mr.
Carson, support among those voters dropped to 14%, from 34% in October.

Similarly,
Mr. Cruz’s support among voters who call themselves “very
conservative’’ rose by 23 percentage points, while Mr. Carson’s support
among that group dropped by 23 points....

The poll offered little ground for cheer for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, long ago considered the party’s front-runner, who like the rest of the field remained stuck with single-digit support....

The
poll also tested what would happen if the field narrowed to only five
candidates: Messrs. Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Carson and Bush.

The
result did not shake up the field’s rank order, as each of the five
gained some support in the shakeout. But the candidate who gained the
most in a hypothetical five-person field was Mr. Rubio, whose vote share
came in at 21%, up 6 percentage points from his support on the full,
10-candidate ballot....

"Solidity of the home front, i.e., mutual
trust between the people and their government, has to be statecraft's
paramount priority.But the assumption on which our ruling class based
its approach to internal security against terrorism-namely, that it is
impossible to distinguish ordinary Americans from terrorists—negates the
basis for mutual trust. Ordinary Americans, on whom the government
imposed ever more intrusive security measures and whom it scolded for
being "Islamophobes," reasonably felt that government might regard them
as "violent extremists." Our rulers also went out of their way to appease the most unfriendly parts of America's tiny Islamic population,
including seeking advice on the proper attitude to take toward Muslims
from the transparently anti-American Council On American Islamic
Relations. But this simply gave such people more power to further their
agendas, while foisting upon the American people a dispiriting political correctness. How could anyone have imagined that any people would not
lose confidence in elites that seemed arguablymore solicitous of enemies than of fellow citizens?What would have happened if, instead,
our ruling class had approached the problem of internal security by
reminding itself that the American people had secured American society
very adequately during World War II and the Cold War, against enemies
far more potent and who blended into American society more easily than
contemporary terrorists ever could? Honesty would also have required
admitting that the hijackers of 9/11 were able to succeed partly because
the U.S. government had trained a generation of Americans not to
interfere with hijackings....Our rulers might
have paid attention to Alexis de Tocqueville's observation that America
was much less policed than Europe, but suffered from less crime because
ordinary citizens took public safety into their own hands.

Only with difficulty can we imagine
post-9/11 America...minus the TSA screeners (whose uselessness is demonstratedby every "red
team" test penetration). But we don't have to imagine that the
passengers of Flight 93 took matters into their own hands the moment
they realized that government rules were costing them their lives, and
that, ever since, aircraft passengers have policed their flights with
absolute efficiency. Nor do we have to imagine that ordinary Americans
naturally recoil from and protect themselves against persons who display
the kind of foreignness and animosity that Islamists and their
sympathizers cannot hide. The 2006 case of "the flying Imams" showed the
Imams' threatening behavior caused ordinary Americans to remove them
from a flight and hence from the possibility of doing harm.
Unfortunately, it also showed that the U.S. government came close to
making the Americans' immunological behavior liable to civil penalties.

After 9/11 President George W. Bush told
the American people to go shopping and behave normally.In short:
forget that you will never again be free to live as before. Think about
money. This advice followed naturally from the government's decision to
persist in its ways instead of lifting terrorism's burden from America....It sought to satisfy the
American people withthe pretend-safety of "homeland security," with
images of U.S. troops in combat, and perhaps above all with domestic
prosperity fueled by record-low interest rates and massive
deficit-spending.

This pretend-prosperity aimed not only
to anesthetize criticism of endless war, but also to feed both political
parties' many constituencies—the ruling class's standard procedure.
Both parties joined in expanding federal guarantees for sub-prime
mortgages, subsidies for education, alternative fuels, and countless
activities dear to well-connected players. Both parties congratulated
themselves for establishing new entitlements for prescription drugs and
for medical care for children. When the "great recession" began in 2007
Democrats blamed Republicans' excessive spending on "the wars," while
Republicans blamed it on Democrats' excessive spending on everything
else. Both are correct, and both are responsible.Hard ChoicesTen years after 9/11, America is not at
peace, is poorer, less civil, and less hopeful.But the experts are in
chargeas never before.

In the American political marketplace of
2012, the American ruling class's stock is at a historic low....For us to
understand how these mostly intelligent people could have made errors so
big for so long requires understanding the principles they violated,
and the moral as well as the intellectual dimensions of their errors.
More difficult yet, both intellectually and morally, is the essential
task of explaining the hard choices that will be required to deal with
the troubles bequeathed us by this decade of defeat."